


TAIL GOES UP, SHIT GOES DOWN: a Zutterworld fable

by Cephalopod



Category: Big Bang (Band)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Cannibalism, Corpse Desecration, Gen, Organized Crime, Zutter (Song), sweet-tempered livestock who probably shouldn't be blamed for their role in all this
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-10-24
Updated: 2015-10-24
Packaged: 2018-04-27 20:21:09
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,227
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5062726
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Cephalopod/pseuds/Cephalopod
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A true and scrupulous account of life at the shitheap end of the Ggondae crew, related through the experiences of Don the Pig as they pertain to eating sketchy guys, getting his ears scratched by sketchy guys, and thinking pleasant thoughts. GD and TOP make problems for themselves and others.</p>
            </blockquote>





	TAIL GOES UP, SHIT GOES DOWN: a Zutterworld fable

**Author's Note:**

> This is an in-universe account, which is to say that this shit goes down in Zutterworld and all persons, alive or dead, exist solely as their extremely shady personae in the Zutter video. The sole exception to this is Don; Don is a universal constant.

There was something going on.

People had been coming and going more over the last few days, and almost none of them brought food. Just the opposite, actually—there hadn’t been a nighttime meal for a while, and if you were smaller or more gracious at the trough, there hadn’t been much for the morning meal either. The people coming and going certainly hadn’t been there to inspect the livestock; they barely even paused as they passed through the barn. Even the ones he’d never seen before, the ones who obviously didn’t know their way around, barely glanced over. Mostly they picked their way through the mess on the floor outside the pen, careful in dark suits and hard shoes or fast and brightly-colored in sneakers and jackets. Occasionally they’d look over, and Don could imagine that the ones in suits, especially, looked uncomfortable. He wondered why.

Whatever they were doing, it probably had something to do with why pickings were so slim. He was hungry! Everybody else was hungry too, of course, but the hungrier he got the less he was inclined toward a kindly herd feeling. And everyone else felt the same, as far as he could tell. He’d been bitten, trod on, knocked over, and had done all of those things to other pigs for no especially good reason. One of the sows had lost her tail in a fight; their people had relented and thrown in a few turnips that night. Just the once, though.

Fortunately for them all, it was morning. The sun had come up through the windows outside just a short while ago, and the place was busy with the sounds of people and the grunts of his fellow pigs having spent a long day and a long night on empty stomachs.

A person—cleaner than most of the tenders—slung a narrow leg over the fence of their pen, then another, and nearly went to the floor on a wad of slippery dung. One of the buckets he was carrying swung wildly; a slosh of something that was probably food sluiced onto the ground. Don hurried over to guess at his chances for a bite and judged them poor. When the man came up again, swearing, through a mess of urgently rooting pigs, Don looked up into his face and essayed a hopeful swish of his curled tail.

“Asshole,” the man said to him, not unkindly. He was still cleaner than most people who came into the pen, even with the dung. Light hair. And he smelled nice. Not food nice, not really. Wood and fruit. Not the kind of fruit good for eating. Don’s mouth watered a little anyway, because it _had_ been a rough few days. Not quite rough enough to really consider whether he wanted to bother chewing through the stiff jean fabric covering the leg closest to him. The man didn’t notice the resigned dribble at Don’s chin, which was just as well. He wiped a blotch of something off his face and upended the other pail over Don and the pigs nearest him—hay, some of it, cut grass, something to root in. Normal stuff. Don rooted. It wasn’t food, but it had been next to food, which was closer than Don had been since yesterday. The man patted his flank in passing and as he prodded through the grass with his snout Don twitched his tail again. Maybe there’d be a baby mouse in the hay, or a piece of discarded bun, or maybe just a few crude little grains clinging to the stalks?

No?

There was a clamor of squeals as the man dumped the slop pail into the trough. Don trotted over there instead, relegating the grass to a hobby project later on.

Don wasn’t especially small, or especially gracious. Still, when T-ssi’s huge bristled shoulder drove in to push him aside, he wasn’t all that inclined to pick a fight. T-ssi was the biggest boar he’d ever met, certainly the biggest one here. Don had long since decided there were better things to do than go at him over a few mouthfuls of tteok. And anyway, sometimes it was better to go second.

Poor Minseo. He missed her.

Don shoved a smaller boar out of the way to get his own mouthful—mostly sauce and onions—and chewed it messily as one of the sows bit the flank of the boar he’d just displaced to displace him yet again. She grumbled up to the trough next to him, rummaging her dexterous snout through the runny mess of leftover for something worth having. There wasn’t much. A blob of…egg, maybe, a scrap of ham. Don swallowed his mouthful and hoped there’d be even sauce left when the sow finished her root.

She looked thoughtfully up out of the trough at him, then, snout red and slimy-wet with gochujang and a fragment of ham glued between her nostrils. Don found his urge to dig back into the trough well and truly quashed. Without shame, he fled. Everyone was hungry. These were rough times.

Don milled aimlessly for some time after that, free of anything to occupy his time other than reminiscing. There was a bit of a dust-up between T-ssi and the boar Don had been a jerk to earlier, and to his surprise it didn’t half badly for the smaller boar. A few bites, some terrible snorts and screeching that everybody else tried hard to ignore, and it was pretty much over. When Don looked over, the smaller boar was scuttling away without visible difficulty and T-ssi was tossing his snout and blowing to show how clearly he’d gotten the better of the exchange.

Don was, despite himself, a little disappointed. That could have been lunch.

And that made him think of Minseo. He missed her a lot. His sister, his littermate, and the only one who’d stayed here in this barn after they’d weaned and who-knows-what had happened to his mother and the five other siblings they’d nursed next to. Those, he didn’t miss so much. Even his mother was just a hazy memory of hugeness and milk and an enormous crushing weight when she rolled over. He didn’t think of her much. But he and Minseo had grown up together, rooted together, fought over food together. The first time things had gotten rough, the first time they stopped feeding the herd, he and Minseo had both chewed on the wooden supports of the trough until the day finally came when the people in suits threw someone over the fence wearing nothing at all. That man didn’t move and he wasn’t warm, but he was absolutely wonderful to eat after a long few days of nothing. Don and Minseo had never welcomed a meal more. Minseo liked the guts. Probably because they smelled like food, but like different kinds of food at the same time. He could understand that. Don hadn’t been picky—he still wasn’t—and had grubbed for whatever was closest.

Those had been the days.

It wasn’t the last time they’d stopped feeding, only to give them a person. That happened a handful of times while he was still small, or at least smaller than he was now. He and Minseo had been happy together.

He rooted glumly in the wads of grass from earlier. It was hard not to think of how that nice time had ended. He’d had a mouthful of something unremarkable from the most recent person, the start of a very pleasant meal and Minseo had been digging in next to him, when she’d made the most terrible sound straight into a faceful of guts and she’d started flailing and kicking and bending ways she shouldn’t and drooling out blood and trying to bite and oh, it had been awful. The worst thing he’d ever seen. She’d tried to dig into the man’s guts in the last few moments, which had seemed so strange to him even in the midst of all the other things she was doing, and died with her cheek pushed into his liver like it was a soft pad of straw. There was a little plastic thing in the guts, a little bag with something in it, and she’d bitten it, it seemed, maybe eaten some of it—he didn’t know what that was, didn’t know what had happened, but after seen what had happened to her, he never once ate guts again.

They ate Minseo too, of course. Everybody had. Even Don had. She had been very tasty, but he hadn’t really enjoyed it. And here he was, stomach grumbling moodily at him, chewing again on the wooden support of the trough like they'd both done back then. It made him feel a little better.

While he'd whiled away the time not eating and thinking of unpleasant things, a pair of men had come into the barn and now they were leaning over the fence of the pen to talk in low voices to each other. One was the man who’d fed them earlier, the one with the grass and the nice smell and the interesting leg, and Don hadn’t ever seen the other one. One of the fast, brightly-colored ones. He didn’t pay that much attention to the details of them, honestly, not unless they brought food like the other one had.

They were leaning over the fence just above him, and the one who hadn't called him Asshole reached down to make an idle drum of his back with both hands. It felt nice.

Some indistinct rhythmic noises. “Piggy piggy hell yeah.” Thump. Tha-thump. “Piggy gimme some, gimme gimme some yeah.” His head wagged with the beat of it.

“That's an actual pig, G.”

“No shit.”

“It eats people. Don't flirt with it.”

“Hey, you’re taking care of these guys now, right? I wouldn’t just jump on one of them like that. We’d have to go out a few times first. Get some barbecue or something.” Thump tha-thump. Don shifted his weight to lean fully against the fence, hoping for a scratch.

“Whatever,” sighed the man with the leg, glancing up toward the ceiling. “This job is shit. Literally.”

“Figures. We pissed off Ggondae pretty good. Still beats night shift at 711.”

“Maybe. How’s mopping ajeossi jizz out of the bathhouse going these days, high roller?”

“Fuck you.”

Don scratched his own flank on the fence, because clearly no one was going to do it for him, and munched a few stalks of greener-than-not grass from the pile. They tasted good, if nothing else. It was quiet for a few seconds other than the soft sounds of pigs lounging in the afternoon warmth.

Thump. Tha-thump. “Hell with it. Let’s take Ggondae out and toss him in here. He’s a pile of shit already, right? You know we could take him. Take his job maybe. Get you out of this shithole farmer life, back into the stone cold badass routine.”

“Ggondae’s got a boss too. You wanna piss off people who like you even less?”

“We can make it work. Fucker locked us in a freezer.” said the one who hadn’t fed him, scratching hard behind Don's ears. Don made a wheezy grunt of pleasure and decided he liked this man almost as much as the one with the leg. Bliss. “And I know you remember that part, don't even try to lie to me.”

“Fucker,” said the one with the leg, “has done considerably more than that. Plan was to give these guys Baby Skin from Ssuga’s crew for dinner.”

“BS? Going down? The hell?”

The man with the leg gave the other one a look Don didn’t really understand, but both of them seemed to think it was important. It was certainly important enough that he was no longer getting his ears fondled just so, and that wasn't right. Don shifted his head to take advantage of the hand there, even if it wasn’t doing anything presently.

“Why not you, you mean?”

“Well, yeah.”

“You’re just a fuckup. He was skimming. A lot. Apparently.”

“Wow.”

“Our thing blew his cover is all. That’s just what I heard.”

“No wonder I couldn’t steal my shit back. There wasn’t shit in there! Drinking money, like. I mean, you know that, ‘cause I was buying, but it wasn’t much really-”

“More than enough to get me stuck here for helping you. The more I think about it the more I wouldn't mind seeing both those assholes turn to pig shit.”

“Don't see why we've got to choose between ‘em,” said Don’s new second-favorite. Grinning, he abandoned Don's ears to make a gesture from his eyes to the other man's; he made it back and grinned as well. People were so strange.

They left after that, and there were no more visitors other than some unhurried comings and goings that didn’t involve pigs, so Don went about his own business as usual with an increasingly grumblesome stomach. The hours passed. The barn got dim, for a time, and then bright again as someone switched on the overhead lights. And then off again a while after that, whereupon the barn fell into proper dark and stillness. Despite his hunger and the half-hearted urge to trample or bite something, Don laid down with his butt cozily nudged up against another pig and slept. They all did. Even T-ssi.

Don dreamed of persimmons. Ripe, rotten-soft persimmons. He was still dreaming of persimmons—rolling in them, burying his face in them, eating them by the hundreds—when the lights came back on and he woke up with a start and drool coating his snout. He stood up, shaking a few strings of it off. The others were coming awake too, curious and irritable and all of them hungry. They jostled to either side of him. He couldn’t see much other than flank and backside before he reared up and propped himself awkwardly across one of them. Whoever it was make a protest and bucked a little, but they too were pinned in place by the press of curious pigs.

The big door to the outside rolled up and admitted most of a car into the barn. A sharp smell of exhaust rolled in with it, and the thump of music. Two people inside the car. No top on it. Some of the pigs snorted, or squealed; someone in the car laughed. They got out, opened up the rear end of the car, and pulled something out.

Was that a person wearing nothing? Was this dinner? It was! Don squealed out a needy, pigletty sound he’d be embarrassed by at any other time, but not today. Food!

“Damn, he's heavy.”

“Pork belly for the pork belly, man. C'mon. Swing! One, two-”

The naked human soared over the fence, clocking Don in the snout with a knee as he went, but Don couldn’t be bothered to mind when it meant he’d be right there where it landed. A few pigs went down underneath it, but they were back up on their hooves again at once and they, like Don, dove in.

Don’s tail thrashed in delight as he bit and tore and chewed and oh, what a good day this was turning out to be, what a good thing the man with the leg had done for them. And the other one, the one who’d scratched his ears so well. He’d been so right to have a good feeling about them. As he studiously rooted a clump of guts aside in favor of a wad of muscle and fat—it was hard to tell which part was which—there was another thump behind him and another cascade of squeals. Two people! Wow. They’d never been that lucky before. And he’d been so grouchy that afternoon too. It just went to show that you could always hope for the best, even when things seemed awful.

Minseo would have thought that was just asking to get trod on. He chewed a still-warm mouthful and wished she could have been next to him crunching a bone instead of T-ssi munching up half a spongy lung. Those smelled terrible anyway; T-ssi could damn well have them.

His two favorite people were leaning over the fence again, watching them eat.

“Nasty, T.”

“It’s a living.”

Don made a happy noise toward them and trotted over, still chewing. He leaned against the fence expectantly. Surely his ears deserved more attention by now.

“Hey, Don.” That was the man with the leg. He gave Don a pat on the flank, same as usual. “This one’s Don,” he told the other. “Probably.”

Don raised his snout, bloody as it was, to snort. He liked that one. He liked them both. And if one would only rub his ears, tonight would be pretty much entirely perfect.

“Guess we gotta figure out how we’re gonna run this shit now,” said the other one, the man who despite being so good at it last time would. Not. Rub. Don’s. Ears. Don bucked his head up toward the man’s arms, folded over the top of the fence. Where was that hand? “Ah man, it’s going to be so great. Only reason I’m ever going in that bathhouse again is to get f-”

Don found the hand, and bit it.

“ffFUCKING ASSHOLE! Shit!”

“Don! Bad pig. Don’t bite him, you’ll catch something.”

“You’re going to catch walking your own ass home!”

“Heh.” The man with the leg—finally—ruffled Don’s ears. Perfect. “Anyway, you hungry?”

“Fuck! Ow. Probably shouldn’t be, but yeah. Like, considering they’re still working on BS’s face over there?”

“Yeah, I don’t watch that part.”

“T. Great idea,” said the one he’d bitten. He was looking straight at Don when he said it, and there was a light in his eye that Don didn’t like at all. “You and me, barbecue, right now. I know you know how to make that happen. C’mon.”

“Nah. Look at that face.”

“Huh? I’m looking, there’s half of it still stuck on and you forgot to take his earring out.”

“At the pig.” The man with the leg flicked at Don’s ear. Don grunted amicably, and hitched up a back foot to scratch with profound contentment at his full stomach.

“All I’m seeing there is a pork belly attached to the pork face that tried to eat me. It’s only fair.”

“I’m not butchering anything in this new suit, G. I want a burger. And so do you.”

“Fine.”

They turned and left in the car, but they left the lights on and the door open. The sounds of nighttime from outside were pleasant. So were the low crunchings and rustlings that bespoke the last of the people gradually being enveloped by a mass of happy pig. Don found a knob of bone and saved it for later; he settled down to sleep with the white lump nestled between his front feet, under his chin where anyone who saw it and decided they wanted it would have to wake him up to steal it. He’d have it in the morning, he told himself, a nice snack before breakfast.

His resolve didn’t last. A few hours before dawn, still half-asleep, he rolled onto his side and let himself munch the little thing down. He _was_ a pig, after all.

 

**Author's Note:**

> Our hero:  
> 
> 
>  
> 
> Look at that face.


End file.
